How Active Can I Safely Be While Undergoing Cancer Treatment?

How Active Can I Safely Be While Undergoing Cancer Treatment? (1:44)

There's no prescription for optimum activity levels during cancer treatment. To learn about the factors that will help you determine how active you can be while being treated for cancer, watch this video featuring Dr. Stewart Fleishman.

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How active you can be really depends upon your exact situation, there are cancers that will nest in the bone and you don't want to do things that can crack a bone, it's very painful and it's something that isn't often necessary for you to endure during treatments. So the best thing to do is start with your cancer specialist and your nurse and specifically ask what you can do.

It also depends upon where you are in your treatment, so for example for most people who have had surgery on the first day they're told to seat up in their bed and dangle their legs, on the second day they're told to seat in a chair. On the third day, if all is going on well, they're told to take their IV pole and push it down the hall way and walk back and forth a certain number of times.

Generally people are discharged after that and they don't really have any guidance about what to do. So until you get better guidance from your treatment team, probably the smartest thing to do is walk around, if you have a private home walk up and down the steps two, three times a day, not because you have to get something because it's good for you.

If you live in an apartment house, sometimes walk in the hall way, if you don't want to see your neighbors because you don't want to tell your story so many times, wait until everybody goes to work and use the fire stairs and go a little bit further each day. You will get tired that's Okay, but then on your next appointment make sure to speak with your cancer specialist to find out exactly what the limitations are.

The American College of Sports Medicine is very involved in tailoring exercise programs or activity programs for cancer patients and many desirous of physical medicine specialists and physical therapists are specializing in activity programs during and after cancer treatment and you need to access them.

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About Stewart Fleishman, MD

Stewart Fleishman, MD, is a cancer researcher and the author of companion books, LEARN to Live Through Cancer: What You Need to Know and Do and the Manual of Cancer Treatment Recovery: What the Practitioner Needs to Know and Do.